Between Two Hemistichs: the Mistress as Caesura of Love in French Psychoanalysis (freud, Lacan, Green and the Structure of the ‘third’)
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: This essay proposes the heuristic notion of a “caesura of the mistress” to describe the structural function of the “other woman” in French psychoanalytic theory, from Freud’s contributions to the psychology of love to Lacan’s reading of Dora and Green’s theory of the negative. The mistress is treated not as a biographical episode but as a limit that simultaneously divides and binds tenderness and sensuality, wife and mother, the couple and its outside. Three modalities of the caesura (articulating, vacant and occluded) are distinguished, and the analytic situation is read as a caesura of the same kind.
Author: Mariia Panasiuk
Institution: National University Ostroh Academy
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W7225339964